#2 pencil is conductive. That makes it easy to read it by machine. I suppose you could do the same thing with a camera and a computer though.

Does any modern scanning equipment use electrical conductivity of pencil marks to read forms? I could see maybe back in the 60's when cameras and photo sensors were expensive, but I'd be surprised if anything built in the past 30 years doesn't use optical sensors.

Actually, most equipment, such as Scantron, etc, does. While it's possible to do it optically, it can be done much faster by using electrical conductivity. That said, when, instead of correctly spotting 100 marks on a multiple choice answer sheet, you only need to do a few points, optical sensors probably make more sense.

All of the Scanners on Scantron's page say they do Optical Mark Recognition and/or Imaging. And they can detect ink or pencil marks.

Do you have an actual reference for equipment that uses electrical conductivity to count marks? As I said, I can certainly believe that early machines did, but not anything built recently. I really don't see how electrical counting could be faster than optical counters -- keeping a good electrical contact with fast moving paper seems a lot harder than bouncing light off the paper.

I found an article confirming that early Scantron machines did use electrical conductivity to count marks:

The earliest scantron-like machines used electrical conductivity, rather than light, to read forms. Graphite is quite conductive, so the machines simply had a mechanism at each markable area location to make contact with the form and detect if an electrical current is detected across the area. These systems were used as early as the 1930s.

I just cast a paper ballot an hour ago. There are bubbles I fill in next to my choices, and then a scanner reads the ballot for instant reporting. Then, if there are any problems, the paper ballot, minus any way to identify who cast it, remains to be recounted by hand if necessary.

Paper ballots aren't perfect with regards to fraud. They still beat the pants off any electronic system, though. At best, electronic systems that print a paper trail that the voter can visually inspect are still vulnerable eve

Have you ever cast an absentee ballot? The one's I've used were quite anonymous.

The one I did would have allowed for my boss to have collected it and filled it out for me, then sit over me and watch me sign it and then he could mail it himself. The only "issue" would be that he'd have to have me at work by 7 for a 12 hour day on election day, as they are supposed to not count absentee ballots until *after* the election (And only then if the margin is close enough) and then they strike any where the "absentee" voter voted in person.

We use paper ballots in Canada... counters get paid a small stipend (something like $30) to count the ballots, there's scrutineers to make sure they're counting properly, and any party can send a representative to watch the counting. When a ballot is counted, the person reads out loud who the vote is for, and shows it to another person to confirm. Any party can request a recount on the spot, and there's an automatic recount when the two leading candidates are close enough together in votes. Because there's paper ballots, we can keep a physical record of the voting, and in the event that there's a discrepancy or challenge, we can always go back and tally the votes again.

Since each polling station isn't more than 200-300 voters (most voting locations will have 6 or 7 polling stations each), we're still able to have results by the end of the night.

Considering that your current election is costing an estimated $1billion, I think you can afford to use paper ballots.

Sounds like Americans should start thinking about a constitutional amendment to fix your voting system. Something like Elections Canada to run the elections and have fair impartial election districts.Seems that for a democracy the most important thing is to have fair elections where most everyone can agree who the winner is. With this election looking to be another close to tie, that'll make 3 out of the last 4 elections questionable.

A problem that doesn't exist? How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand?

Canada does it. Its pretty efficient.

Oh noes you will cry out, America has 10x the population, and it will cost 10x as much, and require 10x as many people.

This is all true. But that 10x cost is divided by 10x the population, making it cost the same per capita.

Another way of looking at it would be to consider that the 50 states each essentially run their own elections, and even the most populous states aren't more populous than Canada.

The point is that Canada manages it just fine, and there is no valid argument that it can't be scaled in the USA.

Paper ballots are counted by elections canada temporary staff, with oversight by full time employees, and members of the party. I've participated in a couple myself.

My observations:

Disputes over spoiled ballots are pretty much a non-issue.

Their are several protocols in place to safegaurd against fraud. Stuffing the ballot box would not be simple at all. Each station has a ballot box linked to a list of voters, and a record of who voted. The votes are counted against the number of voters on the list who voted.

Per the procedures:

At the polling station specified on the voter information card, the poll clerk crosses the voter's name off the voters list. The deputy returning officer hands the voter a folded ballot with the initials of the deputy returning officer on the outside.

(At this point the voter goes behind the voter screen to make their mark.)

The voter then re-folds the ballot so that the deputy returning officer's initials are visible and hands it to the deputy returning officer. The deputy returning officer checks the initials and the number shown on the counterfoil, removes the counterfoil and discards it, and returns the ballot to the voter. The voter, or the deputy returning officer at the voter's request, places the folded ballot in the ballot box. The poll clerk then places a mark in the "Voted" column beside the elector's name on the voters list.

The ballots themselves have counterfeit protections, and are carefully accounted for. As each vote is cast serial numbers are checked. (But not recorded alongside the voter who placed the vote.)

Really you'd have to corrupt a pretty large chunk of the polling staff, then they could simply ignore the votes and write down whatever totals they wanted as long as it added up to the number of people who voted, and certify and transmit the results them. You'd still have to get it past the other parties observers, but they usually don't send enough people to watch everything all the time.*And then as long as no one called for a recount, no one would ever know.

* Of course they *could* and if fraud were a significant problem, they probably would. In my experience we usually have a couple party affiliated observers in a polling site with 6 or 7 polling stations. The closer the anticipated race the more scrutiny.

I've been a poll worker here (in California) several times, and the only hand-counting of ballots we did was literally just that -- counting the number of paper ballots in the box at the end of the day, to make sure it matched the number of signatures we had gathered in the log book. With a team of 5 poll workers doing it in parallel (and checking each other's work), it takes about 30 minutes to complete. Given that poll workers are paid a flat fee ($100 or so for the day), the cost isn't high.

Vote count delays? Issues with recounts? The ease in which paper votes can be "lost" in transit to the counting facility? The ease with which paper ballots can be tampered with? The fact that there are plenty of people who can easily screw up a paper ballot (aka hanging chads)?

Why is vote count delay even an issue? I know the 24 hour median wants results in prime time, but who cares about that? The president isn't sworn in until late January, let the counters take as long as is needed to do it right.

Here in Missouri, we use a paper ballot that you just darken a box for your selection. It is then read by a machine and tallyed. Pretty simple! Also, there is a paper ballot to fall back on if there is a recount or any problems. Until electronic voting becomes more secure and foolproof, I think this is the best possible procedure.

Speaking as a Canadian here, who has actually worked for Elections Canada in the past three times now, let me clarify just how paper ballots work just fine up here:

Until your scanning machine gets out of alignment

Won't happen. Ballots are counted by hand.

...the people you hired to do hand counts get bribed

As the ballot counts are done in pairs, and even then are subject to being witnessed by the candidates or their representatives, you'd have to bribe one heck of a lot of people... up to and possibly even including the candidates themselves. Ballots with any writing or other identifying marks on them other than the voter's selection, which must be marked as described by the illustrated posters near each voting station, which might distinguish them from other ballots are considered "spoiled" and are not counted.

... or someone loses the ballots on the way to be counted

This is also can't happen, since the ballots are counted right there, almost immediately after the polls close.

The only real danger is if there is some sort of natural disaster which threatens one of the polling stations. I'm not sure what the recourse of EC would be in such a case... possibly a revote for people in that area.

Where innovating is a nice way of saying "funneling public money to private buddies and corrupting the electoral process while you're at it".

The most staggering part, however, is that US elections aren't followed by a spree of arrests. Then again, the DA who would have to prosecute is an elected official as well. Round and round she goes, where she is, nobody knows.

Minor correction. The decision on whether to count the ballot at the polling station lies exclusively with the deputy returning officer. Scrutineers are, however, permitted to object to any ballot being improperly counted, or spoiled. The impugned ballot is noted by the DRO, and subject to review if necessary.

But you're right, paper ballots work just fine. And counting by hand doesn't meaningfully slow down the process of results for polling stations from being made public.

For blind people, there is a sleeve the ballot can be inserted into which has Braille markings with the candidate's names and openings through which the voter can mark the "X". Also an election official can, if the voter wishes, read the names of the candidates while guiding the voters hand down the openings in the sleeve to acquaint the voter with the options. Then the official leaves the area behind the voting screen so the voter can vote in secret. At his/her option, a voter can designate an assistant to help them with voting, who is required to sign a declaration that they will assist the voter in voting the way they intended, and not disclose the candidate whom the voter selected to anyone. A voter, if he/she wishes can have an election official assist with the voting in a similar way, and of course, such officials are sworn to assist correctly.

5000 extra votes get slipped in. And in the US, they are more worried about making sure your votes are cast than eliminating bad ones, as "officially" there are no bad votes, so that they don't throw out ballot boxes when there are 1000 eligible voters and 10,000 votes cast. But, fi they ever start, just make sure you drop the 5000 favorable ballots into a box in a district usually won by "the other guy" so that if they count them, you win, and if they throw them, you still win. And, with the vote system used now, there's no way to validate any single vote in a spoiled box.

The UK uses paper and pencil. Candidates may personally supervise counting or their agents can. Funnily enough, the Federal Republic of Germany (pop about 80m) does fine with paper and pencil and usually, there is a single, transferable vote type system so more complicated as you have take into account people's secondary choices.

Canada solved this too. People must have 4 consecutive hours available to vote. So if the polling stations are open from 7 AM to 8 PM, the employer could require the employee to leave at 4 PM (to allow for 4-8 PM), or arrive at 11 AM (to allow for 7-11 AM).

There's likely no conspiracy, just a few crappy uncalibrated voting machines out there. Nothing like a hotly contested election to get the spotlight out on something that probably nets out to nothing in the end.

There's likely no conspiracy, just a few crappy uncalibrated voting machines out there

Supposedly someone has posted a video showing them working the way down the screen with the pointer, looking for the calibration bounds, and it turned out that a solid block over the two major-party candidates always cast a vote for the same one, but on the two third-party candidates it worked perfectly.

As an American I am embarrassed by these problems. Is this due to incompetence? Not enough people caring? How can we expect government to grow and manage things like disaster relief, healthcare, and retirement when we simply can't get a working election system. This morning I went to vote in DC. I waited 60 minutes in line to get inside a church that had one working machine. Really? In the middle of a city we have a voting station with a single voting machine. Should I expect a single nurse for my flu shot?

I'm embarrased for you too. It's not that hard to get voting systems right and they scale with population perfectly fine - the fact that America can make a complete arse of it is a sign of how far you guys have fallen.

The thing is, there has probably been more rampant voter fraud during the days of paper ballots than anything happening with these machines.

Ignoring the fact that you have absolutely no data to backup your assertion...

The difference is, with electronic machines NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW. It is possible (even if difficult) to find lost ballots, get evidence of ballot tampering, etc. But good luck doing that without physical evidence.

And it doesn't even have to be malicious tampering. Do those thing run RAID storage? What if someone brings a magnet into the voting booth?

Look guys, it's a few glitches. There are what, 350 million people in the US, half are eligible to vote, so 175 million voters. A couple of thousand counted wrong is tops a few VOTE RECORDED: MITT ROMNEY

Our number one export apparently, in terms of money spent. And yet, we can't actually have democracy at home. How much of a banana republic do we need to become before the UN starts to intervene and forces us to be monitored by their people to make sure we have a fair election?

I live in a small town outside San Francisco. It seems that two local districts vote in the place I went this morning, so a guy at the door routed voters to table A or table B depending on our street addresses. The problem was that competing teams of little-old-lady election volunteers were engaged in a turf war over who "owned" which voting booths. When I got my ballot from table A, the booths closest to it were occupied and the volunteers directed my wife and I to the ones nearer table B.

You would have thought I had peed all over the table B volunteers' Thanksgiving turkey.

Little Old Lady: Sir? Sir! These are for table B! You're supposed to use the booths over by table A!
Me: Umm, is there a difference?
LOL: Yes! These are for table B! If they're all filled up, table B people won't be able to vote!
Me: Well, table A's booths are all filled up and I'd like to vote, too.
LOL, whining and angry: But these are for table B!

I think that the answer may lie in your second sentence: "It seems that two local districts vote in the place I went this morning, so a guy at the door routed voters to table A or table B depending on our street addresses."

.

I am guessing that the booths tabulated results for two different voting precincts/districts, and that the routing/sorting of voters as they entered was based upon which distrist contains their address.

This answer would make sense if the voting occured in the booth electronically. If,

The machine in the video [youtube.com] is an ES&S IVotronic terminal. It's the same terminal I voted on this morning. It directly appears the digitizer is incorrectly calibrated. What the video author doesn't show is the paper tabulator in the lower left corner. It would of clearly showed his vote being tallied incorrectly. Perhaps he was voting Romney and didn't want his cast vote shown, but the paper trail recorder clearly shows your selection in the window. It even shows when you got back and correct a selection. Now, they key is that each candidate field on the screen is independently calibrated and can be re-calibrated [wired.com] in under a minute by any third party.

At minimum, this terminal should of been isolated and inspected for tampering. Hopefully that was the ultimate outcome. I know I would of not left the area until a proper election official arrived.

I like having a polling place. It means that you actually know that your vote entered the system, unlike vote-by-mail where it can be thrown out for any number of reasons without you ever having a chance to contest them. If your right to vote is contested, you know it, and if you've provided sufficient proof that you can vote your vote goes in the same box with everyone else's. If the clerk throws your vote-by-mail ballot out at 9PM on elect

Harder than an ATM machine? Harder than a nuclear power plant control room? Harder than a 787 Dreamliner fly by wire system?

The key problem: Price.

Your examples can be counted on to be in use pretty much all of the time.

Not so with voting machines, where they sit unused in warehouses for months on end.

As a result, it's hard to justify to "fiscally responsible" election committees that your more expensive device is the best for the job.

One of the easiest things to cheap out on is the touchscreen. The touch sensors on your iOS or Android device are generally top of the line capacitive sensors - and even they have trouble from time to time.

If you go for a cheap resistive touch sensor, you can be pretty screwed. I know my office's HP DeskJet all-in-one has an extremely low-end touch screen - it's best described as "touch the screen, and get anything except what you intended to press.

I'm far more willing to chalk it up to deprecated, cheap-ass touch sensors than I am to call it fraud.

Frankly, we need the guys designing slot machine or video poker to do our voting machines - with the same regulations too (ie. full source code disclosure, full schematics, and so on). I think it's criminal that we require casinos to prove their machines aren't hacked, and require full source code and schematics -- but the same standard doesn’t exist for voting machines.

Harder than an ATM machine? Harder than a nuclear power plant control room? Harder than a 787 Dreamliner fly by wire system?

In all of the cases you describe, a contractor that screws up will be fined and sued into oblivion (ATM machine spitting out money, nuclear power plant meltdown, 787 falling down from the sky due to faulty wiring)

What we desperately need is to sue the contractors responsible for delivering malfunctioning voter machines into non-existence. Not "take machines offline" and probably buy from the same contractor next year.

The democratic party isn't doing so great in SC. According to the wikipedia [wikipedia.org]...

The South Carolina Democratic Party controls none of the statewide offices and holds the minority in both the South Carolina Senate and the South Carolina House of Representatives. Democrats hold one of the state's six U.S. House seats.

At least here in Las Vegas the voting machines here are held to the same standards of slot machines... The rest of the nation has it wrong sadly.

You mean no matter who's using the machine, the odds are they won't get what they wanted, but they'll feel like they got close enough that they keep coming back to pull the lever? No, I think that's pretty much what the rest of the nation gets.

I voted with one of those machines today. It's not a touchscreen, you use a trackball to select the candidate. The guy is obviously trying to make it look like the machine doesn't work by touching the screen and not showing the trackball being moved.

I'm a PA (Pgh) resident and I used the exact same machine today. It did _not_ have a trackball.

So your theory is that a network that even in it's highest rated time slot only gets around 3 million viewers is somehow able to single handedly force a partisan divide in a nation of 350 million? That would be akin to me blaming the dumbing down of America on MSNBC.

I'm pretty sure the divide is being driven by people who think Fox news is the biggest threat to democracy and the source of all political doom in the US or for that matter focus on any single media source as the cause. The cause is much more